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So when we think about
how our minds work,
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we tend to think there's a
lot of hidden stuff in there.
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If we really could think very
carefully about all the things
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we know and why we
think them, there'd
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just be an enormous trail of
justifications and reasons.
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And we can't necessarily
probe all those,
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but if we start to think
about them, some of them
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seem to appear.
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I think, why did I do one thing?
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Oh, I did it because of this.
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And I did that because
of something else,
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and off I go down a series of
complicated justifications.
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And it's easy to think
that that was just
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tucked there away in my
mind, and what I'm doing
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is I'm sort of exploring
this internal space
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and this internal mental world.
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But think about it for a minute.
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Supposing I ask you, as indeed
was asked in quite a well known
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psychological study
many years ago,
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how some everyday piece of
equipment works, for example,
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the air conditioner?
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So you think to yourself,
air conditioners, well, I
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must pretty much
understand how they work.
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And you, if you like, perhaps
could draw a little diagram,
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maybe a little
exercise for you now,
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just to think, how
would I draw a diagram
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to explain how an air
conditioner works?
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And probably if you spend a few
minutes having a go at this,
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you'll find that you
are amazingly baffled.
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It's really, really hard to
think, well, sort of warm air
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goes in and cold air
kind of comes out,
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and there's something pushing
it through, and it sort of just
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gets cold.
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How does that work?
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Well, after a bit
of pondering, you
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might start to feel you don't
really understand this at all.
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Interestingly, large
numbers of people,
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when probed on this
kind of problem,
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tend to think they
do understand it,
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and their diagram
often, they feel,
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pretty well encapsulates
what an air conditioner does.
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But really, they don't.
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None of us do.
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Or at least people who
have done lots of physics
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and thought about it do,
but it's pretty puzzling.
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Now, air conditioners
are one thing.
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We're not very
familiar with those.
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But this is just a general fact
about the way the mind works,
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that we have an illusion
of understanding, which
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is much more rich and varied
than the actual understanding
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inside us.
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Say, for example, I ask you why
you eat a particular breakfast
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cereal or why you live
in a particular house.
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You may think, well, that's
like the air conditioner.
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I must have a lot of
thoughts about that
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and I can give you some.
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But if you start to probe those
thoughts and analyse them,
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you might find that they're
actually just as feeble,
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just as incoherent as your
thoughts about how air
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conditioners work.
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And actually, that's
not surprising
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because human decisions
and the people who
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make them are obviously
far more complicated
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than air conditioners are.
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Just one intuition to make you
feel unsettled about the things
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you think you know and the
justifications you think you
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have for your behaviour.
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Everyone who's had a
small child or has contact
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with a small child will remember
the phase in which there's
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a constant sequence
of why questions.
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And the really puzzling
thing about these
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why questions is you can't
answer almost any of them.
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So things like, why
is the sky blue,
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or why do we drive this
side and not that side?
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Almost any question
a child will produce
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for you has an
immediate sense of,
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oh, that's a simple question.
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I know the answer to that.
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It's easy.
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Followed by utter bafflement.
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Now, I want to
suggest that this is
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a really very general problem.
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We're seeing the
world through not just
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rose tinted spectacles,
but almost as if they
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were sort of
panoramic spectacles.
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We see a world which we think
we understand very well.
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We think we see lots of it.
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We think we have a full
view of what's going on.
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But in reality, we don't.
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So if it's the case
that we understand
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much less than we think, we have
an illusion of understanding
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about the world around
us and ourselves,
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how is this illusion sustained?
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And the answer is that whenever
we ask ourselves a question,
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we produce an answer.
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And if we ask ourselves
another question,
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we cook up some answer
to that as well.
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And the trick is that
we're very good at creating
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these instant answers and
it gives the impression
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that the answer is, as it were,
lurking in our minds all along.
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But the instant answer
shouldn't be trusted.
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We just made them up.
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So here's an interesting
example, a very old example
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from a great social
psychology experiment
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of Festinger and Carlsmith.
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So what they did is
they asked people
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to do a fairly boring task.
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So in fact, they had
some sort of peg board,
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and you had to take the pegs and
twist them a quarter of the way
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around, and then do it
again and again and again
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with many different pegs.
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Very, very dull.
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And you were paid a
small amount of money.
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I think it was $1
for doing this task.
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Now, at the end of the task,
you had to get someone else
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to do it.
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So your task was to go out
and find another recruit.
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And you either got paid
a small amount of money
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to get another recruit to
do the task or a really
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large amount of money.
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I think it was $20, which
when this experiment was done,
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many years ago, was a very
large amount of money indeed.
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Now, when you go out
to get that person
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and you're getting paid
a lot of money to do it,
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what do you suspect?
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You think, crumbs, this
task must be horrendous.
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I've got to persuade some
poor, unsuspecting person
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to do something
which really has got
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to be fairly unpleasant
because they're paying me
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$20 to get someone to do it.
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I'm going to have to pretty
much fool them, deceive them
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into doing the task because
if I told them how terrible it
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really was, then
they'd never do it.
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So it's almost bribery from
the experimenters to me
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that I've got to be given
the task of recruiting
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some hapless subject, so it
must be a really miserable thing
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to do.
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Of course, the person you
actually try to recruit
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is, in fact, a stooge of the
experiment as it's all a con,
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but off you go.
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You're paid a little or a
lot to get another subject,
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and then you just
asked in passing
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what you thought of
the original task.
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And it turns out that people,
as you might suspect given
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the way I framed it,
people who have been paid
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a small amount of money
to get another subject
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think, well, it wasn't too bad.
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It was a bit dull.
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That's OK.
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It was perfectly fine.
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But when you've been
paid a lot of money
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to get someone
else to do it, you
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think, well, it must
have been awful.
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So you say it was
a terrible task.
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I hated it.
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It was very, very boring indeed.
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In fact, quite unpleasant.
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Why do you think that?
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You think that because,
as I've suggested,
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you're trying to make
sense of the fact
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that you've just been given $20
to encourage someone else to do
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this.
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If it's that much
they're paying you,
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it must be a pretty miserable
task you're getting someone
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to do, so you must
not have enjoyed it.
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Must have been a
miserable experience.
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Now, that's an
interesting example
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of the general phenomenon.
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You might think
naively as you go
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through a task or
any experience,
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you just think on some sort
of mental meter, it's good,
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it's bad, it's indifferent.
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But according to the
view that when you're
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asked a question, what did
you think of that experience,
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you have to cook up an answer.
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You don't really
know the answer.
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You think, oh crumbs,
gosh, I don't know.
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Let me think.
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Then what happened
afterwards-- in this case,
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whether you were paid a
lot or a little to get
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someone else to do it--
what happened afterwards
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can affect your view.
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So it turns out that
in this experiment, as
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in many, many others, you infer
what you must have experienced
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based not just on the
experience itself,
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but on things that came later.
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A rather different but
interesting related
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phenomenon, which you may
have noticed yourself,
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is called hindsight bias.
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So supposing you are
wondering whether something's
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likely to happen or
whether someone's
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going to succeed in
something or whether you're
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going to enjoy an experience.
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Afterwards, you look back,
and now you know the answer.
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Did it happen?
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Did you enjoy the
experience or whatever?
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Now, suppose we ask you what
you thought in the first place.
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So I go to a restaurant.
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I don't know whether
I'm going to enjoy it.
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It turns out to be awful.
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Then you ask me,
what did you think
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it would be like
before you went?
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Interestingly, and
very, very consistently,
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I tend, if I had
a bad experience,
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to think I probably might
have had a bad experience.
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I was tending to be
suspicious that it
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was going to be
a bad experience.
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On the other hand, if
everything went well,
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then I tend to have a
positive glow about what
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I thought in the first place.
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So if you're asking me
after the event, what
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did I think before
the event, I tend
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to shift and to
shuffle my thoughts
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in the direction of what I
actually know to be true.
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So, for example, if
I make a decision
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and it goes horribly wrong
or if you make a decision
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and it goes horribly
wrong, we tend to think,
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ah, I should have
known, or I half knew,
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or I feared this would happen.
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And if it goes right,
I tend to think,
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I always had a feeling
that was going to work out,
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that new hire was
going to be a success,
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or those builders were
going to be great.
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The same story that we talked
about earlier is going on.
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So it's not the case that
as I go through my life,
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I have a clear idea
of what I think
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and how strongly I think it.
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When you ask me what I
thought about something,
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I can't look back in my mental
record and say, hang on.
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I've got a detailed
record of all my thoughts,
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and there they all
are written down.
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I'll just have a quick look.
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I can't do that.
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When you ask me a question about
what I thought in the past,
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I have to cook up an answer now.
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I have to infer what
I probably thought.
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And of course, if you
ask me whether I thought
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something would be a
success or a failure,
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and I know it was a
success, perhaps a failure,
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I tend to think, well, it
did work out really well.
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I know that, and
that probably was
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something I suspected,
because normally, I'm
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a fairly sensible person.
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So I tend to twist my
interpretation of what
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I thought in the first place
towards what actually happened.
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I tend to be biassed
by hindsight.
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Now, of course,
this is something
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we see all over the place in
the news and in daily life.
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People are always saying,
well, I knew that would happen.
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I knew that was a mistake.
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And you may respond,
no you didn't.
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We talked about it and there was
no mention of this at the time.
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But of course hindsight bias
is a very powerful illusion
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00:09:44.730 --> 00:09:46.780
and it fools all of us.
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And the reason is
that we don't have,
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as we flow through our lives,
a clear record what we believe,
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of what we value, of the
nature of our experiences.
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When you ask me a question about
what I thought in the past,
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I cook up the answer now.
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If I know stuff now,
like it was a disaster,
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00:10:04.040 --> 00:10:07.570
it all went horribly wrong, I
can't get that out of my mind
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00:10:07.570 --> 00:10:09.210
and ignore it to
try and get back
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00:10:09.210 --> 00:10:11.290
to what I really thought
in the first place.
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00:10:11.290 --> 00:10:13.125
And in fact, it is
quite possibly the case
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that there really is no
answer to what I really
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00:10:15.600 --> 00:10:16.970
thought in the first place.
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00:10:16.970 --> 00:10:19.110
And we'll see that in a second.
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